CAD, BIM & 3D

Vaclav Chaloupka created a three-part video tutorial, explaining how to use Blender for a full architectural visualization animation. Tutorial: building a house in Blender 3d software - part 1 from Vaclav Chaloupka on Vimeo . Part 1 - building the house shell. For more see http://blender-house.spaces.live.com/ The tutorial has 3 parts. Walk through the process of creating a 3D model of a house from scratch to the final visualization. The final result can be seen on http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=2d7baa18-4946-4479-b8af-3462920fc377 Blender (http://www.blender.org/) Blender a free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.

Here is a nice tutorial describing how to get a 3D Model from SketchUp (even the free version) into Blender, for visualization. http://alexvaqp.googlepages.com/sketchupblender It involves exporting to a Google Earth file, renaming it to a ZIP-file, unpacking it and discovering the Collada file that is inside.

Hugin is an Open Source, Cross-Platform application to create seamless panoramic images by stitching. A free and open alternative to RealVIZ Stitcher (now bought by Autodesk). Go to http://hugin.sourceforge.net and download the precompiled application (OSX, Linux, Windows) or the sources if you know what you are doing. Added: You can also use if for the correction of perspective, removal of distortion. It can call some external tools for automatic stitching (autopano) and automatic blending (enblend).

A nice gesture: you can freely download a full book on Photoshop for Web Designers in PDF format. http://www.sitepoint.com/launch/f948f3 . You have to be willing to provide your e-mail address. The offer expires in about a month from now.

The Pencil application is an Open Source vectorial drawing application, with animation support. It uses the Qt toolkit making it compatible with Windows, OSX and Linux. You can also create bitmap images and the support for "onion skinning" allows you to see previous (and next) frames when creating animations. As always with this kind of applications, having a Tablet/Pen/Stylus and artistic feeling will improve your results.

As read on http://www.rickyjordan.com/2008/05/3dvia-shape.html , 3dvia provides a free modeling application, called Shape , which resembles SketchUp. It requires the user to be online and is Windows-only.